Women Lead the Way to Oscar

Blindness and Rachel Getting Married

by Teresa Jusino

Fall is here, and in Hollywood that means that it’s time to roll out the best of the best.  This year is particularly exciting as many of this year’s Oscar-positioned films have either a female protagonist, or a female-dominant ensemble.  What’s more, they have well-written, substantial roles for women well over 35.  Who would’ve thought?!

Blindness, based on the novel by Jose Saramago, tells the story of The Wife (stunningly played by Julianne Moore), the lone person with sight after a mysterious plague nicknamed “The White Sickness” blinds the world’s population, dooming people not to darkness, but to seeing nothing but a thick white as though they were “swimming in milk.”  Mark Ruffalo plays her husband, The Doctor, who first notices the strange condition before succumbing to it himself.  As the epidemic spreads, the government of the nameless country in the film places all its victims in quarantine, and The Wife feigns blindness in order to be taken along with her husband.  They are taken to an abandoned asylum where there is no staff save the armed, trigger-happy guards outside.  More and more people are infected and packed into the building.  Food rations arrive periodically, but other than that the blind are left to fend for themselves, and their situation quickly degenerates.  People soon turn into animals that relieve themselves wherever they can, walk around naked and dirty, and fight for scraps of food.  Gael Garcia Bernal plays the King of Ward Three, an infected man who doesn’t take kindly to authority unless he wields it.  He manages to have his ward hoard the food, and soon, the infected aren’t just struggling against the armed guards outside, but against each other.

Blindness is a stunning achievement.  The performances are brilliant and nuanced across the board, Fernando Meirelles’ direction is beautiful, and both his skill and that of cinematographer, Cesar Charlone, successfully capture a world where vision becomes less about what you see and more about what you think and feel…

And I never need to see it again.

To say that Blindness is disturbing would be an understatement.  This is a raw depiction of the depths to which human beings can sink when backed into a corner, and human beings can sink pretty damn low.  One scene in the middle of the film – you’ll know the one I mean – was so disturbing it made me wretch as I watched it and is still haunting me days after I’ve seen it.  People become more and more horrible as the movie goes on, and even as hope emerges victorious in the end, I remain unsettled.

The thought that kept running through my head afterward was that women (and children) suffer doubly in a crisis, as they are forced to deal not only with the crisis itself, but with men who are cornered and feel the need to lash out at the physically weak.  It made me angry.  It made me afraid.  It made me sad.  However, after the film was long over and I was halfway home, the note of hope on which Blindness ends finally resonated with me as I realized that both Saramago in the original novel, and Don McKellar in the screenplay, hold up women as the world’s salvation.  It is a woman who has vision and leads her new, ragtag family out of hellish conditions and into a new normalcy.  It is the women of the film who most successfully hold onto their humanity and maintain a sense of order and ritual when the world is crashing down around them.  Honor your mothers, wives, and daughters, the film seems to say.  They’re going to save the world.

Blindness is worth seeing, but only once.

Rachel Getting Married, however, is a film I’m already planning on seeing again.  This film, directed by Jonathan Demme and written by first-time screenwriter, Jenny Lumet (yes, daughter of that Lumet), tells the story of Kym (played by Anne Hathaway in a performance that’s worthy of the hype), a troubled young woman who has spent 10 years in and out of rehab and gets to come home for a weekend for her sister’s wedding.   As we learn more about her history of addiction and the tragic event that defines her life and relationship with her family, we get to spend time with a fascinating character and a family that are a joy to interact with, despite their dysfunction.  Intense confrontation and dredging up of the past gives way to some of the purest, truest love I’ve ever seen depicted on film.

Rachel Getting Married is an example of a perfect match between a director and a script.  Jonathan Demme’s gift for coaxing brilliant performances from actors and his unconventional shooting style is just what Lumet’s colorful, tightly-written, character-focused script needed.  The entire ensemble cast deserves praise for their performances – particularly Bill Irwin in a sweet and complex performance as the family patriarch – but this film belongs to the women in it.  Once again, Anne Hathaway deserves all the early Oscar buzz she’s already receiving.  Her performance is fierce and completely lived-in.    However, I hope that the Oscar talk also starts circling around Rosemary DeWitt, who plays the titular Rachel.  Her performance, like her character, is more subtle, but the result is just as powerful as Hathaway’s.  It’s amazing to watch her eyes well with tears as she looks at her betrothed, or her struggle to balance her mixed feelings about her n’er do well sister.  She is an actress to watch.  Lastly, Debra Winger is phenomenal as their estranged mother.  This is another example of a wonderful role written for a woman well past 35 – a mother who is about as non-maternal as one can get; who loves her daughters, but doesn’t really know how to care for them, or handle them, or even talk to them.    However, the most refreshing aspect of this film is how it is effortlessly and unselfconsciously multi-ethnic and multiracial.  The titular marriage is an interracial one – Rachel is white, her fiancée (played by Tunde Adebimpe) is black, and yet it is never an issue, or even addressed.  Irwin’s character has divorced Debra Winger and remarried a woman named Carol, played by Anna Deveare Smith.  The wedding has Indian influence, jazz elements, African influence, and even samba, and the wedding guests are a jumble of ethnicities and races.  None of this is explained in any way.  It just is, and I appreciated that.  It was honestly reflective of a country that is increasingly mixed both in its influences and in its relationships.

Rachel Getting Married is a stunning film.  It also showed me my dream wedding!

Girly film geeks rejoice! There are plenty of women-focused films coming down the pike.  If summer is the time for testosterone-addled action, fall seems to be the time when powerful female performances get to shine.

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TERESA JUSINO was born on the same day that Skylab fell. Coincidence? She doesn’t think so.  As a writer, her work has appeared in Elmont Life newspaper, and on the sadly defunct website, CentralBooking.com. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories. As a geek, Teresa loves Star Trek, Lost, comics, and anything Joss Whedon ever touched. She has a fangirl *squee-ing* crush on Brian K. Vaughan, which beat up her Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man crush in a fight proving once again that writing skill trumps gadget skill even when that gadget skill is attached to bulging biceps.  Teresa is also an aspiring fangbanger.

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